Gatineau home sales pick up steam in Q1 2019

Home sales in Gatineau rose 16 per cent year-over-year in the first quarter of 2019, fuelled by a surge in transactions in the single-family and condo markets, Quebec’s real estate association said Monday.

A total of 1,055 residential properties changed hands in Gatineau in the first three months of the year, according to the Quebec Federation of Real Estate Boards.

Sales of single-family homes rose 18 per cent from the first quarter of 2018, accounting for 831 of the total transactions, while condo sales increased 19 per cent to a total of 163. Multiplexes were the only category to show a decline, falling six per cent to a total of 60.

While the total number of transactions has been on the rise, the amount of inventory has failed to keep up. There were 2,431 active listings in the Gatineau market in the first quarter, a drop of 11 per cent from a year earlier.

As sales rise, single-family homes and condos are spending less time on the market than they did a year ago. The average single-family home in Gatineau was listed for 76 days in the first quarter, down from 85 days a year ago. Condos, meanwhile, spent an average of 103 days on the market, two weeks less than they did in 2018.

The median price of a single-family home rose five per cent year-over-year to $252,500, while the median condo price dipped one per cent to $160,000. The median price of a multiplex increased five per cent to $290,000.

Overall, residential property sales in Quebec rose eight per cent in the first three months of 2019, totalling 23,667. It marked the 19th consecutive quarterly increase in transactions.

Gatineau posted the third-largest rise in sales among the province’s six major cities behind Trois Rivieres (24 per cent) and Saguenay (17 per cent).

“The demand for properties remains very strong, as we can see by the widespread increase in sales across the province,” Yanick Desnoyers, manager of the QFREB's market analysis department, said in a statement. “The solid performance of Quebec's real estate market is all the more impressive because it comes at a time when markets in Canada's other provinces are declining.”